Humans will become capable of feats that now seem impossible — for many of us, in our lifetime — in large part due to expected advances in brain research, posits the inventor and author in his new book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, due out next month.

Key to his predictions, which he’s also outlined in a series of other books including The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near, is the law of accelerating returns. Kurzweil suggests the pace of information technology advances will grow at an exponential pace until sometime near the end of the century. [...]

The flying car thing has always sort of bugged me as well. When I bring up all the incredible predictions for the next few decades in discussions, too often people say “Yeah, but in the 50′s they said we would have flying cars right now.” Ok, so we don’t have flying cars, but look at all the other even MORE incredible stuff we do have.

Mims, I’m the same — Back to the Future 2 for instance had flying cars in it in the year 2015, but no mention of the Internet whatsoever….kind of funny when you think about it because, not only has the Internet alone been more profoundly enriching then anything portrayed in that movie’s future, but it sort of expresses the common view of the future…that superficially, things will become more advanced but the status quo will essentially still be the same today as it always has been — people will have cars, go to work, grow old, die…nothing profoundly changing to human nature like the kind expressed with the Singularity.

Reality is stranger, and often better, then Fiction….which kind of goes without saying since fiction is drawn up from reality after all.

Mr.X — It’s not that I don’t necessarily like flying cars….it’s just that, when I hear that repeatedly, I wonder if people aren’t getting the bigger picture…I mean, we have enough issues with people on the road for crying out loud, we don’t really need flying cars…..and when everyone is “telepathically” communicating with one another through nanotechnology, or even bigger, one-mind/multiple-bodies with mind-uploading….flying cars start to look more and more superficial.

Bah, It’s still such an old classical idea — heck, for the people who don’t go for augmentation of any sort, flying cars would probably be really cool for them, as it is anyway ^^.